Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The employees of the Haute Stuff Bistro had never seen a lunch date go so wrong.

A nervous-looking guy and a mousey-lloking girl had met at the front table, the one near the window. They had been making nervous small talk for a few minutes when the lady spoke up, concern in her voice.

“Are you okay?” the woman said. “You look awfully red and…well, horny. You’re also radiating visible heat.” Indeed, the air around the man shimmered and his salad was already beginning to brown.

“It’s a little embarrassing,” the man said with a nervous laugh. “But, well, my father’s from Queens and my mother was a lava succubus of the Fifth Circle. So whenever Jupiter is in the house of Mars, I tend to take more after Mom.” His salad, already dried out, caught fire on his plate in an eruption of croutons and oily dressing.

“Oh, that’s so sweet!” said his date. “How did they meet?”

The man loosened his jacket to allow his demon wings to hang free. “Dad tried to sell his soul to win a rollerskate contest. It was the 80s, after all, and skating was big. But instead of passing it up to the Infernal Abode, Mom just hung onto the soul herself.”

“Neat!” said the woman. “That’s kind of like how my parents met, but with rollerskates replaced by coffee and selling souls replaced by buying penny stocks.”

“Sounds like the same thing to me,” the man laughed. “Hey, are you all right? You look a bit uncomfortable.”

She shrugged, popping every button on her blazer. “Oh, you mean the hair and the sudden increase in body mass? I’m a werewolf, but I’m REALLY highly sensitive to moonlight so I tend to break out in fur around noon on the full moon.”

By now the other half of the table was actively ablaze, at least the parts that weren’t actively melting. “One would assume that all werewolves were equally sensitive to full moonlight, but I’m happy to be corrected!” The polyester in the man’s outfit was running molten down his body, the only thing preserving even a hint of modesty.

“Oh, it’s okay! There’s a lot about our culture most people don’t know. For instance, there’s a law from 1911 that bans me from a career as a cook, can you believe it?” Shaking with laughter, the girl spread fur far and wide through the air even as her chair started to splinter at the increased weight. “Do you know how many times the werewolf lobby has had someone promise to do something about that?”

“Oh, I believe it,” her date said, now seated cross-legged on a pile of ashes. “I’m an artist and I have a similar problem. I can’t draw using human-ash charcoal or souls! Ethically sourced, I promise, but they still throw a stink.”

“Hey,” said the girl in a husky baritone. “Wanna ditch this place? I know somewhere we can get some great souls and human ash.”

“Definitely.” The man floated up and out the door, the cries of agonized souls audible in his wake, followed by his date on paws that cracked the floor tiles as a few half-burned dollar bills fluttered to the ground where the table one had been.

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It was supposed to be professional. Never personal. But that had been before the notes had started appearing at the scenes, written in perfect English and often proper beneath spent rifle casings.

After an assassination that took an innocent life: “I’m sorry about that bystander. But history will remember them now, when they would have been anonymous.”

After killing an opposition politician in a pet store: “That parakeet will be singing a very different tune from now on, eh?”

Each time, the assassin from the Other Side had escaped, leaving the counter-assassin from This Side to fume at the notes, at the bravado hinted at by them. But not this time.

The Other Side had gotten tired of their assassin, it seemed. They expected excellence but not bravado, and perhaps they feared that their trigger finger was getting out of control. So they let it slip to This Side when and where their agent would be.

The assassin slipped into the cathedral, a demon among the faithful on Ash Wednesday. Their target was a clergyman, an outspoken opponent of a regime with which the Other Side was very friendly. They didn’t particularly care if he lived or died, so long as This Side took the assassin down.

Like the hammer of destiny, the counter-assassin from This Side followed. The enemy was in a sniper’s nest in the attic, her high heels set to one side for a quick getaway.

But something unexpected happened next. Not a single gunshot, as the Other Side had hoped. But, rather, an embrace, as old friends might.

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“This has got to stop,” Saunders said. “The janitor found your shoe on top of the incubator last night. I don’t need to tell you what a serious violation of our safety policies that is.”

Meredith looked on defiantly. “Then Noreen and I won’t fool around at work anymore,” she said. “Happy?”

“No, I’m not,” said Saunders. “I’m not sure what I need to do, Meredith, to persuade you of the seriousness of the situation. You are our senior microbiologist on this project, and you are letting your personal feelings intrude upon your work.”

“On the contrary,” Meredith said. “Since Noreen joined the team, you’ll find I’ve never been more productive.”

“Look, I know what you’re going through,” Sanders said. “I met my ex-wife in the lab. But I’m not just a bystander here! This project is international in scope and this vaccine could save millions and be worth billions if we get it to trial. It could take this company to new heights! You just need to keep the bedroom in the bedroom and the lab in the lab Please?”

Meredith made a noncommittal noise before walking out, the click of her heels audible long after she had faded from view. Saunders picked up his desk telephone–landlines were easier to tap, but less prone to fail. He had the number memorized.

“It’s Saunders,” he said. “Yes. Meredith has no idea what a trench she’d dug herself down into. Did you get anything on Noreen? Anything she might have preferred to stay hidden?”

A pause. “Oh my God,” said Saunders. “No, no, that’s all right. I’ll try to handle it from here. But if it’s an inside job, if those payments have been coming from where they seem to be…”

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It wasn’t until Emmaline collapsed one Sunday while running the Roanoke Island Marathon that we found out the answer: leukemia. Em needed a bone marrow transplant, but there was every reason to be optimistic: the family was huge and surely there’d be a donor.

Nobody matched. In fact, the lack of matches was so suspicious that Mom insisted they do a DNA test just as Emmaline was going into chemo. She was looking for a mistake, hoping to trip the doctors up at their own game. When the results came back, she locked herself in her room for three days

Emmaline wasn’t related to any of us.

I went with Mom to see her sister, still holed up in Tanglewood where she’d been since the meds had stopped working. Mom confronted Aggie directly with a demand about Emmaline’s parentage. Aggie didn’t respond at first, just sitting there and taking it. It was only when we were set to leave that she whispered something about a notebook pasted behind the wallpaper of her old room.

We hadn’t lived in that house, any of us, for decades. But Mom, somehow, talked her way inside. Aggie had repapered the room shortly after Emmaline had been born, our own little scandal. Mom had been working on me at the time, and Dad had already gotten himself killed. It had been just her with three daughters and a niece.

A secret compartment was behind the paper, secreted between two of the framing timbers. It was as old as the house, but Aggie had filled it with little mementos through a hole in the old paper, one that was still visible when we peeled back the new. The notebook was there, swollen with age but still readable if a little musty.

It was filled with notes about a friend, Edna Parker, who I had never heard of. Mom muttered something about her disappearing when she was young, but the last lines in the notebook were there plain for anyone to read.

I’ve never been more jealous then when I see Edna quietly starting to swell up with Roger’s baby. Out of curiosity, I wonder what it would be like if our lives were to swap…me, bringing up Roger’s delightful little baby, the only little piece of him I’ll ever get…she, a dead-end crazy girl with nothing but soft padded walls and straitjackets ahead once the voices don’t stop anymore.

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There are three days when I don’t like working the piano bar: Halloween, Christmas, and New Year’s.

Halloween has that carnival atmosphere where everybody has a request but nobody tips because they think their dime-store mask will protect them from the bad karma. I remember a Halloween, two years ago, when the only thing that showed up in my tip jar was a bobbing apple with a sloppy bite, oxidation already browning it.

People at Christmas are generous with their food but not with their tips. I get plenty of cookies that night, but everyone seems to be quietly guilty that they’re at O’Sullivan’s rather than in the warm embrace of kith and kin. It’s just a sad twirl on the dance floor, awkward passes made at anything that stirs their loins, and longing looks at mistletoe. Oh, and Christmas carol requests. Nothing but. My professors at Julliard would be spinning in their graves if they were dead.

But New Year’s is the worst.

This past New Year’s, I was sitting at my piano playing Auld Lang Syne for the millionth time, nursing a sprained ankle under my dress pants and with a glass of sassafrass beading sweat and leaving a ring on the piano. People will offer you a drink if you don’t have something amber going to waste on your piano, I’ve learned, and they don’t take kindly to being turned down. Better to have something, anything, up there rather than causing controversy with the people who should–emphasis on should–be tipping you.

A drunk lady approached me, with just the right attitude that I thought I was in for some juvenile flirting. Not that I’d mind under ordinary circumstances–people hitting on you do tend to tip until they realize you’re not going for it because you like your job–but people are possessive around the holidays. I remember when the other pianist I alternate with, Zack, got his lights punched out because he flirted with a punchy patron’s hubby.

“I’ve got a strange request for you,” she slurred. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, but there’s a tip in it for you.” She stuffed a hundred-dollar bill–a real live Benjamin–in my tip jar before I could respond. “Okay then,” she continued, as if I’d actually agreed sight unseen. “Here’s what I want you to do.”

She reached into a voluminous designer purse and pulled out a piece of sheet music. Ancient stuff, yellowed and fragile-looking, though it didn’t crumble in my hands. “Play this song,” she said. “See that person over there? It’s the song of their soul, and every note you play will make them totally in the power of anybody who commands them.”

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A beast writes near the timer. The shell camps opposite, desperate for a lesson. The beast scribbles dashes outside the lines, in contempt. Knowledge impairs the contributor to the recovered magazine. Their living handicaps float across the spectrum with the harsh rain their only companion.

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